


loving you’s a bloodsport

by kattyshack



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cunnilingus, Dirty Talk, F/M, Jealousy, Love Confessions, Possessive Behavior, Secret Relationship, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-23 05:33:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11396355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattyshack/pseuds/kattyshack
Summary: Jon hadn’t begun the evening with a plan to bleed all over the Starks’ pristine white sitting room. But now there’s a scarlet stain on Catelyn’s Persian rug and Jon’s nursing a bloody nose in the kitchen.Or: Catelyn Stark isn’t pleased when Jon Snow makes a spectacle of himself at her latest cocktail party, but her daughter certainly isn’t raising any objections to the way he chooses to defend her honor.(title from “bloodsport,” by raleigh ritchie)





	loving you’s a bloodsport

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> a/n: approx one thousand years ago, julia prompted me a jonsa fic to the tune of raleigh ritchie’s “bloodsport.” after a lifetime and one intense rewrite, i have finally, mercifully, delivered

Jon Snow straightens his tie and tells himself that he’s going to behave. He’s going to get through this party—yet another one of Catelyn Stark’s schmoozy cocktail get-togethers that are more or less a bullet point on her husband’s political platform—without losing his cool. There’s a tic in his jaw and his fingers twitch, but he’s going to keep it under control. Not for his own sake, but for Sansa’s. Because she’d asked him to.

“Please, don’t say anything” are the words with which she greets him at the door. She takes his coat and presses a kiss to his cheek to hide the rest: “Petyr’s here.”

That’s when the tic in his jaw starts, with her soft lips breathing those words against his finely trimmed stubble: _Petyr’s here_.

That smirking, smarmy, _slimy_ bastard is within gutting distance, and now—with one hushed request from Sansa—there is nothing Jon can do about it. He looks at her as though she’s cancelled Christmas.

“Come on, Sansa.” He keeps his voice low, so as not to intrigue any of his fellow guests, and his hand goes to Sansa’s waist to tug her close as they step lightly through the crowded room. “Let me.”

“Let you what, exactly?” She nods at a passing Mace Tyrell, who’s making his way for the bar in the corner of the Starks’ grand front room, then angles her head back towards Jon. “Politely request that he leave me be? I’ll tell you something, Jon, you can be as discreet as you like with him, and he’ll twist your words so well that he’ll have you thinking _you’re_ the one who’s been sniffing around my arse like a bitch in heat.”

“Good God, how many of these have you had?” Jon plucks the champagne flute from her hand and takes a long draw from it. He needs something to fortify his nerves, if Sansa’s uncharacteristic anger is going to be _doing things_ to him. Then again, everything about Sansa _does things_ to him, but seeing her all riled up is an especial cincher.

She snorts, then plucks the glass right back. “Several. Don’t look at me like that, Jon, he’s been sidling up to me for an hour at least. I almost faked a migraine so I could escape to my room for the rest of the night.”

“Why don’t we sneak off to your room now?” he suggests into the hair at her temple. He sweeps the curls from her shoulder and lets his fingers linger on her bare shoulder. “I’ll give you something you won’t have to fake.”

“If they noticed me leaving on my own, what makes you think no one would catch us sneaking away for a—”

“Fuck?” Jon supplies when Sansa falters, his voice a low rumble in her ear. His hand slips to rub circles against her lower back. “No one seems to have noticed me pawing at you in the middle of your parents’ party, have they? You’re just being paranoid. But if it helps, I’ll pay off Arya and Rickon to distract everyone by starting a fistfight.”

A delicious tingle shimmies its way up and down Sansa’s spine at his words, at the insistent press of his fingertips against her tense muscles. “Oh, and you think Arya and Rickon wouldn’t want to know _why_?”

“No,” Jon says, “I don’t. They’d probably start a fistfight for free, you know how bored they get at these things.”

“So do you,” Sansa reminds him. Her hand is on his chest and his heart pounds, aching to have her even though he just had that morning. “Is that why you’re offering? You’ve been here five minutes and you’re already bored?”

“Sansa,” he says so dryly that she might think he was completely unaffected if she didn’t know him so well, “I could be on the brink of a major scientific discovery and still stop to fuck you.”

It’s not a sentiment meant to calm or relax—Sansa has been sleeping with Jon for nearly three months now, long enough to know he’s trying to get her to follow him to her bedroom or the nearest coat closet—yet her shoulders sag with relief, anyway. He has a way of calming her down, of making her feel like she can say whatever she likes, however she likes, and he will do nothing but listen.

That’s how it had started between them, with Jon listening. After she’d broken up with Joffrey last year, he’d stayed up with her night after night while she cried from sheer relief. When she’d severed ties with her on-again, off-again fling Harry for good, he’d done shots with her at the pub and called them a cab home. And after she had finally gotten Ramsay off her tail… well, that had just been the final nail in Jon’s patience. Something in him had snapped, and he couldn’t simply _listen_ anymore. He’d had enough. So he’d left Sansa for half an hour and taken a tire iron to the guy’s windshield. Ramsay never found out who did it, and Jon had returned to Sansa’s flat afterwards, tossed her on her couch, and he ate her cunt for the first time.

Perhaps needless to say, it had been going rather well between them since.

“Come on, Sansa,” Jon says again, still kneading her shoulder, her back, so that she’s practically putty in his hands in the middle of a crowded room. “We won’t be gone long, I promise. No one will notice—well, Baelish might, but that’s all the better, if you ask me…”

Jon doesn’t like Petyr Baelish looking at his girl. He doesn’t like the man, period. But he’s never wanted to beat anyone as badly as he does when Sansa tells him about Petyr’s compliments, his lingering gaze, or his offers to set her up with a cushy job at one of the many businesses he’s got his fingers in. Jon knows quite well where the man wants to put his fingers, all right, and he’s inclined to break his hands for the mere thought of it.

Sansa raises an eyebrow, the picture of nonchalance, but Jon is close enough to feel her breath stutter when she says, “Someone’s feeling a bit territorial, isn’t he?”

“Mmhmm.” Jon inhales the scent of the perfume she’d spritzed in her hair—something sultry and spicy that makes him want to muss her up in the dark—and he can hardly stifle his groan. “Indulge me, love.”

It’s the look that does it. It’s that small smile of his that manages to be cheeky and hopeful all at once; Sansa would fuck him in the middle of this room if he’d asked her to. That would, of course, be rather appalling to her mother’s guests, so instead Sansa takes Jon by the hand with a long-suffering sigh and (pointedly ignoring his chuckle) drags him as inconspicuously from the room and down the next hall as she can. An impressive feat, she congratulates herself, since she had been ready to pounce on him since he walked through the door. Not that she’d tell him that; she has a cool and collected reputation to maintain, after all.

She’s leading him to her bedroom when Jon tugs on her hand and pulls her into the laundry at the end of the hall.

“Really?” she says when Jon pushes her against the door, effectively slamming it. “It would have taken ten more seconds to get to my room and you push me in with the wash instead?”

“Ten seconds too long.” Jon is already parting his lips over her throat. “I want my mouth on you now.”

Sansa laughs, and Jon swallows the sound. His tongue slips into her mouth and he groans like he’s in the most delicious sort of pain when she sucks on it.

He wants to linger here—where the lighting’s dim and the air is heavy with flowery detergent, where his tongue’s in her mouth and hers in his, where his hands box her against the door—until he’s through with her, but they don’t have the time to linger. Any Stark would be hard-pressed to slip from one of Catelyn’s cocktail parties undetected, and Sansa is too much her mother’s right hand to go missing for longer than it would take for her to freshen her makeup.

They have fifteen minutes at most, and even then Jon thinks he might be overshooting it. So much as he’d like to wheedle away the hours with Sansa in the laundry room, he wastes no time in shoving his hands up her skirt and divesting her of her panties.

“Oi,” Sansa protests when the rip through the fabric cuts into their heavy breathing, “you didn’t have to _ruin_ them.”

“I don’t know what you wear them for, anyway,” Jon mumbles. He sucks on her earlobe so that she forgets her irritation in favor of a pleasurable moan. “You knew I was coming over.”

“You’re a detriment to my lingerie,” she teases, but her laugh catches in her throat when Jon drops to his knees and disappears beneath the hem of her dress.

He presses hungry, open-mouthed kisses to her thigh, but Sansa can feel his grin all the same. “You were saying?”

She tangles her fingers in his hair the way that he likes, the way that makes him say her name like a filthy prayer, which he does now even as she tells him to “Shut up and take me.”

Jon has never been particularly good at following instructions. He’s stubborn, hardheaded, impulsive—he does what he likes, when he likes, as he likes, without any real regard to anything but the here and now. But Sansa gets under his skin—she always has; she’s challenging and demanding, and everything she wants from him, Jon has always been all too willing to give.

Now is no different. She tells him to shut up and take her, and Jon has his mouth on her cunt in the next instant.

And, god, does she taste good. Jon’s eaten her out more times than he can count in the past three months (okay, so it’s something like a hundred-and-three), and he never gets tired of the way she tastes, of the sounds she makes, of the way her muscles clench and shudder. He never grows accustomed to the way her legs hitch around his shoulders, or of that spot behind her knee that she always misses when she shaves.

She pulls his hair and he moans into her cunny because _damn_ , he’ll never get used to the way that she wants him.

He licks into her and she’s as riled up as he is, wound tight as a spring, and Jon wants to let her loose with nothing but his tongue—with the way it strokes her clit, the way it tastes inside her, the way it crafts the words he knows she aches to hear. Sansa may be all prim and proper on the outset, but Jon’s spent enough nights in her bedroom to know what she wants from him. He knows what gets her off, and he knows that his jealousy—however irrational—does the trick as well as his cock ever has.

“ _Mmmm_ , you taste good, sweetheart,” he mutters into the vee of her legs. His hand squeezes her thigh, then moves up to grab at her arse; he gives it a swift slap, then digs his blunt fingernails into it. He relishes in the way she moans around her knuckles, which she’s stuffed into her mouth to stifle the sounds he longs to hear. “Tell me, Sansa, tell me who gets to taste your sweet cunt.”

“You,” she gasps between her teeth. Her manicured nails bite into his neck. “My cunt’s yours, Jon.”

“Yeah it is.” His voice is a growl that dives deep inside of her. “You’re mine, Sansa. You like the way I touch you? You don’t let anyone else touch you like I do. You don’t let anyone else think they’ve got a chance.”

The back of her head knocks against the door when Jon’s fingers join his tongue. “No, no one else. I only want you.”

He knows it’s true, would have known it even she’d never said the words aloud, but the way that she says them—with honesty, conviction, like nothing is more real to her than this—nearly makes him come in his best trousers.

“I only want you, too.” Jon takes her hips and slams her against the door, making it shudder, raising any eyebrows that might be passing by, but Jon doesn’t care. Let them know the way that he wants her, the way that he takes her under their posh, pretentious noses. Let them listen to the way that he loves her; let them know that she is _his_.

She moans his name, pulling every meaning she can from the one sound, the one syllable, pouring intensity and romance into his commonplace name, into a sound that would have meant nothing to him if she hadn’t given him access to the sweet surrender of her thighs spread open upon his wanting mouth.

Jon swears he’s about to short-circuit, about to come, about to spend, about to lose himself in the way her wetness coats his lips. That’s for him, it’s always been for him, but _fuck_ if he doesn’t need to hear her say it.

“Tell me, love.” He dips his tongue into her again and again and again, and there’s never been a sweeter nectar on his taste buds than the way that she wants him. He glances up at her through the darkness, and catches a glimpse of her fluttering eyelashes. “Tell me I’m the only one. Tell me you don’t want anyone else.”

“You’re it, Jon,” Sansa sighs without hesitation. Her perfectly filed, scarlet fingertips card through his hair. “You’re all there is for me.”

His heart picks up its pace, his cock wants her, but his mouth wants her more. He wants all of her that he can get, but they’ve got all of five minutes left so all he really wants is to make her come harder than he’s ever made her come before. Nothing else matters, no one else matters, because Jon knows none of them have made her come like he has. He’s made sure of that.

“I love eating your pussy, Sansa,” he tells her. He can feel the jump in her pulse at his admission, one he’s made a hundred times before and will make another hundred, thousand, million, so long as it makes her come, and if truer words have ever been spoken Jon doesn’t know what they are. “I could stay here between your legs for as long as you’d have me. You want me to stay here, don’t you, sweet girl? _My_ sweet girl?”

His fingers pump into her the way he’d pump his dick if they had the time, and he lavishes teeth and tongue over her thighs, her hips, her cunt, every inch of her that’s all for him because she’d let him have it. She’d let him have _her_ , and it makes Jon’s blood sing.

“Just mine, you’re just mine, Sansa,” he reminds her as if she needs it. But she’s been his from the start, and Jon knows it. “You don’t want anyone else eating your pretty cunt the way I do, do you? You don’t want Petyr Baelish to know how fucking _sweet_ you taste.”

“No one else could eat my cunt the way you do.” Sansa’s response is immediate, but her voice is strained to the point of breaking as Jon laps her up like a last meal. “You’re all that feels good to me, Jon, just— _oh_ , Jon, oh my _god_ —”

He’s going at her faster now, harder, quickening his pace so that he can make her orgasm sooner rather than later. They’re running out of time and he’s losing patience; he wants her to come apart around his tongue, wants to hear her stutter out his name, wants to know for the thousandth time that she’s his and his alone, because he is so completely _hers_ that he’s got to hear her say that she’s his, too.

He needs to taste her release and know that he’s the only one who can unwind her, the only one who can take her and have her and taste the relief he gives to her—

He smacks her arse again and groans into her cunt that he loves her—her thighs, her pussy, the sweet cum he can taste on her—and her body shakes and shakes and _shakes_. His hands dig into her, her arse, her leg, holding her against the door while moans wrack through her… It’s like the first time he had her all over again, the intensity, the desire, the freedom that unleashes upon her peak—Jon has never felt _more_ than he does when Sansa gasps his name like she does now.

“There you are,” he talks her through the aftershocks, licking through her release. He grips her legs to hold her steady. “There you are, Sansa, my girl, my sweetheart. That feels good, yeah? I only want to make you feel good…”

“You’re going to me come again,” Sansa warns. She jerks his head back, away from her thrumming center, only for him to grin wolfishly up at her.

“Yeah?” He massages her ankles, somehow suggestive and soothing all at once. “Would that be so bad?”

“Perhaps not, if you want my mother to flay you alive,” she supposes aloud. She releases his hair so that Jon can clamber to his feet and catch her mouth in a messy, satisfied kiss. She hums into her taste on his tongue. “ _Hmmm_ , you know you’re the only one who makes me feel like that, don’t you?”

Yes, Jon knows, but that doesn’t stop his heart from soaring, doesn’t stop him from deepening the kiss he’d meant to last for only a moment. He’ll take whatever time he can get with her, but a moment’s never nearly enough; he’d rather make it last as long as he can, make it last forever, because that’s the way that he wants her:

All of her, forever, out in the open and hidden in whatever room he can push her into. It doesn’t matter, not really, not when she gives herself to him like they’re meant to be together.

“I know,” he whispers in the dark. His fingers twist into her hair, and he kisses her for as long as he can before anyone notices they’re gone.

* * *

Jon had told himself he was going to behave, said it so many times that it had become a mantra of sorts. He’d eyed his reflection in the mirror and made himself _promise_ , and yet here he is.

And it’s all Petyr Baelish’s fault.

Jon and Sansa had emerged from the laundry, thoroughly disheveled but not terribly conspicuous when one considers the state of most of the other guests. No matter how posh the gathering, so many couples break off to get a good fuck in that you can hardly tell the difference between them and anyone who doesn’t follow suit. As such, neither Jon nor Sansa had been concerned with their state of dress—that is, until they step back among the throng of the Starks’ party, only to be met with a smirking Petyr Baelish.

The man is easily ignored when he wants to be, but he’s had too many drinks to be deterred now. He stops Jon’s progress into the room with barely a lift of one slim hand, and Jon’s jaw clenches when the older man’s gaze follows the line of Sansa’s legs. Almost unconsciously she steps into Jon’s orbit, but Petyr notices the move when no one else would have.

“Jon Snow.” His voice is a sharp contrast to the light music, clinking glasses, and amicable chatter around them. A grin creeps across Petyr’s face, an expression at once so malicious and meaningless that it has Jon immediately on edge. “Now where might you have snuck off to?”

“I haven’t been here long,” Jon says, honestly enough. He touches the small of Sansa’s back lightly, but reassuringly all the same. “Sansa needed some help in the kitchen.”

Sansa pinches him, warning off the grin he shoots her way. He’d only meant to alleviate the tension, Sansa knows that, but she knows Petyr’s penchant for troublemaking even better. So she turns her charming smile onto him and says, “A minor catering disaster, all taken care of thanks to Jon. He’s too obliging.”

“For a pretty girl like you?” Petyr’s own smile turns to a smirk. “Why, of course he would be.”

“Yes, well—” Sansa starts to excuse them both, but Petyr’s not quite having it. The back of his hand hits Jon’s chest in a show of passive-aggressive, faux-camaraderie that Jon would like to ignore for Sansa’s sake, but his own simmering temper won’t let him.

“The kitchen, was it?” Petyr reiterates, and the tone of his voice makes Jon’s blood boil. The man’s breath reeks of whiskey and overconfidence. “That’s rather far off from the laundry, last I knew? Tell me, Jon, does your girl taste as sweet as I imagine she does? She’s certainly no stranger to my attentions, so I daresay I might be able to find out for myself if I play my cards right—”

Jon doesn’t think, doesn’t process, but has his hand on Petyr Baelish’s throat before another word can come out of it.

Someone says his name—several someones—but he doesn’t recognize their importance as he slams Baelish against the nearest wall; all he cares about is the rattle of Baelish’s teeth and the hiss of pain that escapes between them. He doesn’t hear the hush of the room around them, doesn’t feel the tug of Sansa’s hand on his suit jacket, doesn’t see anything but that smarmy grin on Petyr Baelish’s face, never mind the ache that must be pounding in his skull.

“What was that?” Jon demands, his voice ringing in the silence that he hasn’t noticed. “Say it again, Baelish, go on, give me a reason—”

“You can’t think she wants me, do you, Snow?” Petyr goads, far too clearly for Jon’s liking. “Or is that what you fear? Or else you wouldn’t treat me as such a threat—”

It’s not the worst thing the man could say, but it’s more than enough for Jon. He’s tense, wound-up, waiting for a reason to unleash the temper that’s been flaring since Sansa first told him of Petyr Baelish’s interest in her. She’s been through enough, hasn’t she? Suffered enough, endured enough, and Jon won’t stand idly by while she’s made victim again by yet another unwanted man.

When Jon hits Petyr Baelish, straightaway and dead center, he’s hitting every man who’s ever touched Sansa when she doesn’t want them to.

He doesn’t hear the shocked gasps of the crowded room, only her voice saying _Jon_ , but he couldn’t stop his fists from flying for anything. Maybe that’s wrong, but Petyr’s broken nose beneath his fist doesn’t feel like it is.

Jon doesn’t emerge completely unscathed, either. The fight doesn’t last long—there are too many people around to stop them from beating each other entirely bloody—but Jon takes as many hits as he lands. His blood mingles with Petyr’s, his head and knuckles throb, and Petyr’s words ring in his ears and Jon only hits him harder for it.

“Keep your mouth _shut_ about Sansa,” he demands in a sorry effort to drown out Petyr’s taunts, never mind that everyone near can hear him. Petyr nearly knocks his tooth out and Jon blackens his eye. “Keep your mouth shut and _stay away from her_ —”

Petyr looks very much like he’d provoke Jon more if he could, but they’re broken up by stronger hands than Sansa’s tug on Jon’s jacket. Robb’s got Jon under the arms, hauling him back, and Ned has his own arm around Petyr’s shoulders (pressing his grip perhaps too hard into the man’s throat once or twice, for which Jon is grateful to say the least).

“Settle, mate,” Robb mutters when he releases him. He swipes ineffectually at the blood on Jon’s once-crisp shirtfront, then chances a glance to their left. “You’ve woken the she-wolf.”

Jon closes his eyes for a moment to collect himself, then opens them to follow Robb’s line of sight. Sure enough, standing amidst the shock and murmurs of her esteemed guests, Catelyn Stark—regal and resplendent in a dress as blue as her eyes, as Sansa’s eyes—is fuming elegantly, but so obviously that Jon can practically feel the holes she’s burning into his skin.

So, no, Jon hadn’t begun the evening with a plan to bleed all over the Starks’ pristine white sitting room. But now there’s a scarlet stain on Catelyn’s Persian rug and Jon’s nursing a bloody nose in the kitchen.

He’d be sorry for it, but who the hell decorates their home in _white_ , anyway?

Not that he’d ever say that to Catelyn. There’s a lot of things he would never say to Catelyn, and insulting her interior decoration is a close second only to the confession that he’s fucking her daughter on the sly. Jon may have been her son’s best friend of a near-lifetime, but the woman had never taken to him. He was dirty and rough around the edges and “For God’s sake, Ned, he’s always slouching about.” Jon’s posture had improved over the years, yet he can’t help but consciously sit straighter whenever Catelyn’s judgmental gaze settles on him.

As he does now, when she sweeps into the kitchen, seemingly alone until Sansa breezes through the swinging door, hot on her mother’s heels, and suddenly Jon doesn’t care about the alignment of his goddamn spine.

It doesn’t matter if Catelyn Stark is fuming at him—she always is, anyway, so why should this time be any different? He might even deserve her ire a little bit; after all, he _had_ just pummeled her oldest family friend in front of a crowd of the Westerosi elite for no discernible reason. Jon doesn’t know how anyone could look at Petyr Baelish and not immediately want to punch him in the face, but it’s not as though he’d announced his intentions. As far as Catelyn or the rest of the Starks (or the Baratheons, Tyrells, Lannisters, Martells, et cetera, ad nauseam) know, Jon had just had a few too many and decided to pick on someone he could take in a fight.

But now he looks at Sansa, her red hair and black dress a stark contrast to the white of the kitchen, and he doesn’t care about anything else. No, all he cares about is whether or not Sansa is angry with him, too.

Before he can think to ask or start to explain himself, Catelyn’s usual cool politeness breaks and she has at him:

“What were you _thinking_?” she demands, forcing Jon’s eyes to snap off Sansa and onto her. “I’ve never been so embarrassed—and in my own home, no less! I’ve got my family on damage control, shepherding our guests out _hours_ early, making excuses for you, but I won’t tolerate it, Jon Snow! I don’t want an excuse, I want the truth! You made not only a spectacle of yourself, but of Sansa, too! What on _earth_ were you going on about? And _don’t lie to me_ ,” she adds as Jon opens his mouth to speak, as though she expects nothing but falsehoods to fall from his mouth.

 _She really does think the worst of you, doesn’t she?_ Jon thinks with a grimace. He pinches his nose to stem the blood flow, but there are already drops of it on his collar and the countertop. _Brilliant._

“I wasn’t planning on lying to you,” he says, perhaps more roughly than he should have, all things considered. Because he certainly had made a spectacle of himself, and he knows he should have left Sansa’s name out of it—but how could he help it? He couldn’t let Petyr Baelish think he’d gotten away with it; if no one else had seen, at least Jon had, and he wasn’t about to pretend otherwise.

“So what was your plan?” Catelyn wants to know.

“I didn’t have one,” Jon admits.

That only makes Catelyn roll her eyes, but when she starts to grill him again, Sansa interjects. Jon’s not sure he’s ever been so relieved to hear her voice.

“Mum, please, let him catch his breath, at least.” Sansa digs in the freezer and emerges with a bag of frozen peas, which she presses to his blackening eye. She applies such minimal pressure that Jon hardly feels it at all, or perhaps that’s only because he’s distracted by her other hand as her fingers weave through the hair at the nape of his neck.

Catelyn narrows her eyes at her eldest daughter—not in disapproval or suspicion, but rather in an attempt to figure out something she hadn’t seen before. Perhaps she’s not even seeing it now. But Sansa had always been a proper girl; demure, polite, ladylike in every sense of the word. She is soft and delicate, and abhors violence of any kind. And yet here she is, holding frozen peas to the black eye of a boy with bloody knuckles and a half-broken nose. And, if Catelyn is not mistaken, it had all been for her.

She watches Jon Snow’s arm snake around her daughter’s waist to bring her near. He must think that she can’t see the touch behind the kitchen island, but she would have to be blind to miss it. But then, perhaps she had been blind for longer than she knew.

“What’s going on, Sansa?” Catelyn asks now, her tone softer but leaving no room for deterrence.

At first, Sansa says nothing. Jon’s unobscured eye catches hers—Catelyn sees his fingers flex into her hip, a sign of comfort or encouragement or she doesn’t know what—and Sansa relents, but only enough to say, “Trust me, Mum. The stained rug notwithstanding, you should be thanking Jon.”

 _For making a scene?_ Catelyn wants to ask and almost does, but she holds her tongue before the question can slip off it. Because now, her daughter won’t meet her eye. Now, Jon Snow doesn’t seem to care about bleeding on her countertop as he murmurs, almost too low for Catelyn to hear because he doesn’t care about her, either, “It’s alright, Sansa. You’re alright, love.”

Oh, for the love of god, Catelyn thinks, more indignant with herself than she’d been with Jon scant moments ago. How had she not seen this before?

“Sansa,” she says, voice firm as ever but gentle now, too.

So gentle, in fact, that Sansa manages to meet her mother’s eye, and hers are brimming with tears she’s trying to contain. Catelyn wishes she could take her in her arms, kiss her brow, and shush away the pain like she did when Sansa was younger, sensitive, and breakable. At least, that’s how Catelyn had always perceived her: her pretty little daughter, kind and clever but oh, so soft. Now, though, Sansa’s spine is straight and she’s holding back tears so expertly that they’ve nearly dried up.

Jon pulls Sansa close, and Catelyn realizes, all at once, that it doesn’t fall to her to mend her daughter’s hurts anymore. Jon Snow isn’t Catelyn’s ideal candidate to replace her, but…. Well, it seems as though it’s too late for her objections to count.

“We’ll talk about this later.” Catelyn reaches over the island to squeeze Sansa’s shoulder, and she’s rewarded with a small but bright, thankful smile. She turns her eyes to Jon then, her gaze sharpening out of habit, and adds, “Mind you don’t bleed out in my kitchen, would you?”

And with that, Catelyn sweeps out the way she’d come in, letting the door swing shut in her impressive, intimidating wake.

“She hates me,” Jon decides with finality as soon as the door settles back into its frame, shielding him and Sansa from whatever’s happening beyond.

“She won’t,” Sansa assures him. She sets the bag of peas aside to inspect his injuries. “Not after I tell her about Petyr. She won’t have any energy left over to hate you.”

Jon looks away from the door and back to Sansa, his eyes softening as she touches tentative fingertips to his bruises. He sweeps his hands over her hips, then pulls her between his legs so he can feel the lines of her body against his, so the echo of her heartbeat reverberates into him.

“I’m sorry,” he says in a way he never would have apologized to her mother, despite the fact that he’d ruined Catelyn’s party and her rug in one fell swoop. He hates these parties and that rug was ostentatious as hell, anyway. “Are you angry with me?”

“I should be,” Sansa tells him, “but it’s a good thing you got me off earlier, otherwise I’d still be all wound-up and probably furious with you for _not doing as I asked_.”

Jon smiles, his arms wrapping fully around her waist to pull her tight to his chest. Her hands fall from his face to the back of his neck, where she begins to knead the tension from him. She’s trying not to smile back, but it’s no good, and a rush of relieved breath escapes Jon along with the words he hasn’t yet said, but feels too often, too intensely, too _much_ to keep them from her:

“I love you.”

Sansa doesn’t miss a beat. She never does. “I love you, too.”

“Even when I’m an incorrigible idiot?” Jon asks. His hands trail along her lower back, and Sansa’s twist into his hair. “Like I was tonight?”

“Even then,” she promises, and takes him in a kiss more bruising than any of Petyr Baelish’s hits to his face.

* * *

Jon Snow had told himself he was going to behave. He’d been stern with himself, adamant that he would maintain his patience and hold his temper. As it happens, he’d been absolutely full of shit. But when he takes Sansa against the kitchen counter at the end of the night, he thinks that misbehaving has its merits, too.

And really, he admits privately while Sansa breathes his name hot into his ear, the Starks’ cocktail parties aren’t so bad, after all.


End file.
